Color schemes were pretty straight forward.  I wanted to base them on the Fibblesnork Backgrounds which I like a lot.  The Fibblesnork backgrounds are very small images designed to tile across a web page.  In my case, I wanted to use them to frame the content area.  There are 18 different colors and two sizes for a total of 36 different background color choices.  At some point I plan to support all 18 colors but initially I am only offering three:  Red, Green, and Blue.  Setting up a theme options page to select a color scheme was pretty straight forward, I had done that previously with my Soccer Theme.

WordPress has some built in functionality to do custom header images but it didn’t really do what I wanted.  I wanted to allow a fair amount of control over the look and layout of the header.  I decided to support three header images:  Left, center, and right.  I didn’t want to manage the header images so I decided to leverage the built in media management capability.

The theme options page will present any image that is in the media library as a potential header image.  But how?  I wanted to make it fairly simple to use.  I decided to implement a drag and drop scheme based on the jQuery UI and discussed it in detail in a prior post.  It took a little while to work it all out as I had done very little with jQuery previously.

The last thing I wanted to allow was the ability to tweak the header layout with CSS.  For this I added what I referred to as “CSS Overrides” for the blog title, blog tagline, and the three header images.  The combination of color schemes, custom header images, and CSS Overrides allows the Sandbox LEGO theme to take on a fairly distinct look.

The theme is currently in use on three blogs, I expect to make it available for download in the next few days.  There are a couple issues I know of that need some styling help and I want to get two more color schemes finished before I release it.  Color schemes aren’t too bad – I just need to pick the proper values.  I have a script that actually generates the CSS files.

For the header I wanted the user to select 1-3 images from the media library to use in the header.  I also wanted to allow some styling control over the blog title and tagline and lastly choose a color scheme from a selection of 10-12 choices.  All of this information would make for a very busy theme options page so I decided to make use of the jQuery UI Accordion widget to logically group information into sections.

My theme development area was still running on WordPress 2.7.1 which includes jQuery 1.6 which is not the most recent version.  I should have upgraded WordPress before embarking on my Accordion experiments, I would have saved myself a bunch of time!

As it turns out, Accordion isn’t shipped with WordPress so I have to download it and install it as part of my theme and then load it.  This isn’t a big deal, there are lots of posts across numerous blogs that explain how to load Javascript correctly.  No matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to work.  I played around with jQuery UI Accordion and half a dozen similar solutions trying to get it to work but I could only get one solution partially working.  In the end, I decided to try updating WordPress and start with the latest and greatest.

What do you know?  My Accordion worked perfectly!  So after wasting the better part of two days trying to work with what I had installed, simply updating WordPress was the right answer.  I think the real change was in the jQuery UI ui-core component as at one point I had Accordion working in the older version but only when I loaded the custom packed jQuery download.  When I loaded just the Accordion source file it wouldn’t work.  The custom packed file included something out of jQuery UI ui-core, what I don’t know but it made a difference.  When I looked at the jQuery code in the 2.8.4 release I noticed the ui-core component also had this function where as the 2.7.1 did not.  So something was definitely different and it make a big difference.

Now that I have the Accordion working I am back to making progress on my theme options page.   I have played with jQuery just a bit, this is the first real jQuery application I have worked on.  It is pretty powerful, I can see why it has gotten so much traction.

Frameworks

• Sandbox
• Hybrid
• Thematic
• Whiteboard

I am sure there are more but these are the ones I have looked at.  I had pretty much settled on Sandbox as I found it easy to work with and there was some discussion a while ago about including it as part of WordPress.  I was a bit concerned that it hadn’t been updated since last summer but thought "hey, maybe it is done”.  So I started playing around with it for my LEGO Blog.  What is there now is very much a work in progress.  I got it working enough that I could see where I was going.

Then I saw this:  http://www.plaintxt.org/2009/01/looking-for-a-wordpress-brand/

Uh-oh.  What is the future of Sandbox?  I posed a question on the Wp-Hackers mailing list but the thread went wildly off track and it was  never answered.  The comments on the announcement indicate that it might end up as part of WordPress but other than that, I haven’t seen any other mention of it anywhere.

I am reluctant to invest more time in a Sandbox based theme until I know where it is headed.  I guess I’ll go back and look at the others again.  I really like the idea of child themes so I want to explore this some more before giving up.